Was Jeremy Corbyn's vote boosted by student fraud?

The Electoral Commission is investigating more than 1,000 complaints about irregular voting that may have skewed results in the general election.

The watchdog said there were "troubling" reports of people voting in more than one ballot, with university towns and cities under the most scrutiny, reports the Daily Mail.

According to The Guardian, 38 MPs have written to the commission raising suspicions about voting in their constituencies.

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Students are legally allowed to be registered in their university's constituency and their home constituency at the same time, but can vote only once. However, some voters used social media to claim they had cast more than one vote, the BBC reports.

Thousands more students than expected registered to vote in June's election, producing a surge in the Labour vote across the country, the Electoral Commission says.

It suggests ministers should investigate "developing a new computer system to block duplicate voting", the Daily Telegraph says, and the electorate should be "forced to choose" where they will cast their vote.

However, Cat Smith, shadow minister for voter engagement, said the government must not be too hasty to change laws on multiple-location electoral registration.

"A blanket ban on being registered at two addresses would exclude those who, for reasons of work or study, need to be registered in two places," she said. "This cannot be an attempt to make it harder for young people and students to register to vote."

While the integrity of US election results has been questioned, with claims of Russian hacking, voter fraud in the UK is relatively uncommon. Of the 260 police complaints about irregularities in 2016, a little more than 120 involved local government elections and 66 related to the Brexit referendum.

An Electoral Commission report suggests that voter fraud may be an inevitable consequence of the current electoral register system and that changes may need to be made.

"The relative ease of submitting an application to register to vote using the online service, in comparison to the difficult of contacting a local authority electoral services team by telephone or email to check if they were already registered, meant many people simply submitted another application," says the BBC.